This invention relates to digital video technologies generally and particularly to electronic systems capable of interactively and randomly playing back digital video on a network.
As internet and intranet become prevalent mediums for digital video transmission, their lack of network bandwidth, especially in the case of the internet, is ever more apparent. Due to this and other limitations, users today generally avoid downloading digital video from the World Wide Web (hereinafter xe2x80x9cthe webxe2x80x9d).
In addition to the network""s lack of bandwidth for transferring the typically sizable video clips, accessing video clips on the web generally requires a user to download or playback the entire clip before the user can assess the clip""s importance and relevance. Even when video information is downloaded, the information is limited to sequential playback. This frame-sequential fashion of viewing video clips further restrains the user""s ability to quickly locate material of interest.
Therefore, in order to encourage people to download or playback video information on a network, especially on the internet, a method and apparatus is needed to compensate for the aforementioned problems associated with accessing video on the network.
A method and apparatus of previewing and playing back source video frames is disclosed.
In one embodiment, temporal snapshots of the source video frames are generated and are stored along with the source video frames on a server, wherein each of the temporal snapshots corresponds to a segment of the source video frames. Then the server transmits the temporal snapshots to its client. The temporal snapshots are presented as individual images to a user on the client. The user can then browse through and randomly select the images and playback the corresponding segments of the source video frames independent from downloading or playing back the source video frames from the server.